Turning to the Earth in Grief

June 26, 2025

In grief, we are alone and not alone.
We alone are the stewards of our own grief, and also,
we each are an important part of many histories and ecosystems, 
messy and paradoxical, but full of life. 

It can be hard to access support when we are in grief. Whether we can’t or we don’t know how, or the people around us aren’t sure how to be with us in grief, accessing the support we need can be difficult to do. This is a common experience that many of us struggle with when grief is present in our lives. Grief is often an inward-turning experience. It pulls us through our insides. We can’t deny the ache. I think of the shape my body makes in grief: a small ball, a tight curl. Like blood rushing towards a wound, we compress into our own aching center. It takes our entire body and then some just to hold ourselves. To wrap around what hurts for protection and with love. Sometimes grief demands so much of our energy and attention that we lose our capacity to face outwards. The messages go unread. The dust and dishes pile up.

In the grief spaces that I hold, I offer the poem above as part of a longer meditation to acknowledge the solitary nature of grief while offering the possibility that even when we feel alone in our grief, we are surrounded by an abundance of resource and support. In spite of the cacophony of greed, violence, and extraction that has distorted our collective relationship to life and death, we live within a symphony of universal cycles of change and impermanence, where there is balance, purpose, and meaning within the dance between birth and death, life and change. Our experiences of loss and grief have the potential to expand our awareness and connect us back to the universal cycles and the bigger-than-us intelligence that is constantly unfolding within and around us.

Turning towards the earth when we are in grief can can offer us comfort and relief, and if we are listening, we can be invited into earth’s deeper wisdom around loss, death, and change. Earth is the greatest teacher we have when it comes to grief. I think of the cycle of light and dark inside of a day. I think about a tree and how the life and death of that tree is held by the forest. I think of the animal bones I come across in the desert. I think of rivers and volcanoes. I think of cicadas and whales.

We all are a part of a living, breathing planet, teeming with vibrant interspecies communities that just by being are, in collaboration, growing and tending to life. It is untrue that we are separate from the planet, that as humans we are somehow more important than the interspecies communities we are a part of. We are not separate from the earth. We are the earth. Our bodies are borrowed from the same elements and minerals that make the clouds and the mountains, the oceans and the stars.

Being a planet means that we are held by and are a part of forces that are greater than us — from the seasons and the moon cycles to the migration patterns of birds. No matter where we are, we can always return to the earth. All we need to do is turn our attention towards the living world around us with an open heart. We can sit beneath a tree or weep upon a rock. We can watch a sunset and wait for stars to arrive through dusk. We can lie in the grass with our heart to the ground. We can look up and sing to the sky.

Written and shared with love.
- mai

mai cortez doan is a writer, facilitator, and grief doula living in Albuquerque, NM.
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